Maybe another, softer person would’ve felt for Elisabet’s discomfort, but the look of discontent Felicia received from her room-mate only inspired her eyebrows to rise in half-baked self-righteousness. She digested her mouthful of hamburger quickly, like a hungry carnivore. “Don’t give me that dumb look, Elisabet, hurry up and do it.” Failing to see the complexities in what she was requesting of her, Felicia remained standing in the middle of the room, observing the pace in which Elisabet was responding to her instruction. The toe of her shoe tapped impatiently against the floorboard and her mouth lowered a second time into the tissue of her snack, biting into it with a hunger that was very uncharacteristic of a girl who at her very strictest would count the number of peas she ate from a plate. Ketchup and mayonnaise childishly clung to the corners of her mouth as she pulled away, cheeks puffed anew and jaws chomping to the best of their ability to consume the mammoth morsel.
And all the while, Felicia watched – and seemed to recognize how long this trip was going to be if she let Elisabet control the speed in which things were being done. Still chewing, she looked around Elisabet’s room for a moment, finding a place on her shelf to sit the burger on its wrapped side, and then began to help her room-mate with her troubling mission of removing her nightgown. Besides removing clothes off her own person, lately the main form of apparel she’d gotten used to removing or adding over anyone had been decidedly male; but once upon a time, Felicia had been close enough to her girl-cousins to have enjoyed turning them into Barbie dolls. With a good yank, she attempted to take the loose garment off Elisabet. “You’re quite weird.” Belatedly, Felicia’s tongue found the excess sauces in the hollows of her lips and cleaned them away. Leaning down, with an almost motherly grace, she unzipped the back of the pink dress and reset it on the bed-top before taking a few steps back and turning around to let Elisabet put on the undergarments with some privacy. “I think there are various kinds of weird. There’s the weird that comes from introversion, I think, and the other that comes extroversion – I hate people like that, you can’t get them to shut the fuck up. And then I think there are people who started off awfully normal and then something amazing or something shitty happened.”
Representing the crisis, as Felicia’s began to step quietly around Elisabet’s room, shifting this book and that ornament just a little, or picking it up to look at it properly, her hand lifted to snap her fingers. “They fall into either category, I think, except they’re a little different because even when you don’t know jack shit about them, it’s just so fucking obvious something’s not completely right. And you wonder, Hyne, I wonder what the fuck made them that way.” Felicia pulled out the chair of Elisabet’s desk and sat down on it. Her legs crossed out of habit and she dragged it from side to side on its wheels with little pushes of her feet. Considerately, she regarded the ceiling. Since she knew the other girl to never be much of a talker, Felicia usually went off on little spiels and endless rants. Most of the time, it was just nice to say things to a person who didn’t have the power to punish her for anything that was out of line. “I think we have a lot of those people in Garden. The Commander, for a fucking start. A good quarter of our graduating class. I never thought I was very weird at all, but I’m wondering. I suppose I could be. I know you are.”
Her foot pushed firmly off the floor to spin her around. “Are you done?”